The Sony Warner Anthropic lawsuit, filed on 28 August 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, has set up what could become one of the most financially consequential intellectual property battles in the music industry’s history. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, joined by numerous other publishers, accuse the AI company and its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann of a ‘brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works’ to train its Claude AI models.Docketed as Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC v. Anthropic PBC, Case No. 5:26-cv-09217, the complaint identifies ‘tens of…
Author: Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi spent a decade in corporate banking and fintech before moving to business journalism. She started in trade finance at a major UK bank, moved to a payments company scaling into African markets, and spent her last role leading partnerships at a cross-border remittance platform. She writes about business strategy, fintech, digital banking, and the corporate news that moves markets. She is interested in how companies actually make money rather than how they describe making money in investor presentations. Funke lives in South London. She reads earnings calls the way other people listen to podcasts, and finds them about as reliable.
European AI sovereignty was the unshakeable undercurrent at TechBBQ 2026, the Nordic region’s largest startup conference, which ran on 26–27 August at Bella Center Copenhagen. Onstage and off, from panels to rooftop barbecues and speakers’ dinners on an island in the harbour, the question that kept surfacing was the same: who actually controls the technology Europe is building its future on?The timing was not incidental. On 12 June 2026, Anthropic disabled access to its Claude Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models for users outside the United States, reportedly acting on a US government export control directive that restricted access to…
Berkshire Hathaway stock performance has been a quiet frustration for shareholders this year: the Class B shares closed Friday at $505.00, up just 0.5% year to date, while the S&P 500 has gained 12.7%, leaving Berkshire trailing the benchmark by 12.2 percentage points. Warren Buffett turned 96 on Sunday, and the gap is the awkward birthday backdrop nobody wanted to discuss. The stock did flare briefly higher. After Berkshire’s second-quarter earnings report, Class B shares hit an intraday high of $537.74 on 10 August, their best level since just before Buffett’s May 2025 announcement that he would step down as…
The push by Chinese automakers into humanoid robots has a new price tag on it: $900 million, raised in a single round by Dogotix, the robotics subsidiary of electric-vehicle maker Xpeng, at a post-money valuation of more than $6.3 billion. The round’s structure tells its own story. According to Xpeng’s official newsroom, the $900 million Series A breaks down as $600 million from external investors, $200 million from Xpeng itself, and $100 million from company executives, including founder He Xiaopeng and co-president Brian Gu. The lead investor is IDG Capital, with Gaorong Ventures, Tencent, and Alibaba also participating. Xpeng described…
The Ninth Circuit prediction markets ruling, filed on 28 August 2026, hands state gambling regulators a sweeping victory over federal oversight, and, by creating a direct conflict with a Third Circuit decision from April, makes a Supreme Court showdown look almost inevitable. A unanimous three-judge panel rejected requests for injunctive relief from KalshiEX, Crypto.com, and Robinhood Derivatives, concluding that sports-related event contracts are sports bets regulated by the states, not swaps under the purview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The Ninth Circuit opinion in KalshiEX LLC v. Assad (No. 25-7516) was authored by Circuit Judge Ryan D. Nelson,…
The Apple TV price hike took effect on 28 August 2026, lifting the monthly subscription from $12.99 to $14.99 and the annual plan from $99 to $119. It is, by Variety’s count, the fourth time Apple has raised the price in four years. When Apple TV launched in 2019 at $4.99 per month, the company positioned it as the affordable alternative to Netflix and Disney+. The monthly fee has now tripled from that launch price, a 200% increase, and has risen 50% in the past two years alone, according to TidBITS. Existing subscribers will receive roughly one month’s notice before…
The Any LUV1 electric motorcycle carries up to 120 litres of cargo, hits 100 km/h, and is asking a straightforward question of European city dwellers: why does owning a car still feel like the only sensible option? Any, a Belgian startup, unveiled its first vehicle at Milan Design Week in May, and the prototype attracted enough attention to generate more than 600 reservations in its first 100 days. Each reservation costs €49 (around $57), credited against the purchase price and fully refundable. The LUV1’s base price is set at €7,000 (about $8,150), positioning it below mainstream cars and roughly in…
The StrictlyVC New York event lands on Thursday, 10 September, when TechCrunch’s boutique evening series returns to Manhattan’s West Village for the first time in two years. The lineup spans venture capital’s thorniest debates, the business of professional sport, and the question a growing number of founders are wrestling with: what gets rebuilt when AI takes something away? Keith Rabois on Capital, OpenAI, and the StrictlyVC New York Event The evening opens with Keith Rabois, the investor who recently relocated from Silicon Valley to the East Coast. Rabois has backed Ramp four times and invested repeatedly in State Affairs, an…
The ATF ransomware major incident designation arrived swiftly: senior Department of Justice officials formally classified a cyberattack on the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as a ‘major incident’ under federal guidelines, a legally defined threshold that triggers mandatory notification to Congress within seven days. The Russia-linked Qilin ransomware gang has since claimed responsibility on its public leak site, though it has not offered any evidence to back the assertion. According to the ATF’s official press release, the bureau immediately terminated connections to the affected environment upon discovering the incident and launched incident-response and forensic activities. The ATF…
The CivilGrid Series A closed at $26 million, and it was born from a three-day standstill on a PG&E job site that cost $60,000 and left engineers with an unmarked pipe and no idea who owned it. Josh Mackanic, who spent a decade at Pacific Gas and Electric managing more than $500 million in business, according to Engineering News-Record, kept running into the same structural failure: the underground is, for most of the people who build through it, essentially invisible.Mackanic founded CivilGrid in 2020 to fix that. The San Francisco company aggregates utility asset data, property ownership records, and environmental…
